Citation:

CohenHubal, E A. UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY RESEARCH ACTIVITIES TO CHARACTERIZE CHILDREN'S ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURES. Presented at Internantional Symposium on Children's Environmental Health, Tokyo, Japan, March 22, 2004.

Impact/Purpose:

1. To identify those pesticides, pathways, and activities that represent the highest potential exposures to children;

2. To determine the factors that influence pesticide exposures to children;

3. To develop methods for measuring multimedia exposures to children, including methods that account for important activities that take place in home, school, and day care settings;

4. To generate data on multimedia pesticide concentrations, pesticide biomarkers, and exposure factors that can be used as inputs to aggregate exposure models for children.

Description:

Given the well-established vulnerability of children to the effects of environmental exposures and the array of environmental exposures that have not been studied, understanding the relationship between children's health outcomes and environmental exposures is critical for our children's well being. Over the past eight years significant research activities have been initiated at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) to increase understanding of children's vulnerabilities and to better characterize children's exposures to chemical stressors in the environment.

In 1996, the United States Congress enacted two statutes requiring that US EPA consider children when setting health-based standards: the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 and the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1996. Subsequently, US EPA expanded its ongoing research in the area through 1998 and 2000 initiatives on children's environmental health. In 2000, US EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD) published its Strategy for Research on Environmental Risks to Children, and in 2002, the Administrator released the US EPA Asthma Research Strategy, which addresses an endpoint of particular concern for children. To support these initiatives and to address the most important research gaps identified in the research strategies, US EPA conducts and funds a variety of research on children's environmental exposure.

Although this work was reviewed by EPA and approved for publication, it may not necessarily reflect official agency policy.

Record Details: